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Paul Throt (7:42)

Windows Spotlight. So I have enabled that on the desktop. This is what you see here, probably pretty familiar. There are four Windows Spotlight desktops built into Windows 11. And then over time it starts cycling through those Bing images of the day. So I haven't yet done that. I just turned this on today so I could show it to you. But they've revised this ui. So this bit, this little icon which you can't remove, has moved around the desktop a little bit. It's back to where I think it was originally, which is the lower right corner of the screen. I think this is probably the right place to put it. I'm mousing over it and it's bringing up that more information pop up. And you can see these familiar desktops, right? Because anyone who's used Windows 11 has seen at least a few of these. These are the. Those backdrops that are built into Windows 11. But you can learn more from here. You can, like, not like, whatever. So you used to have to kind of right click on this to get to that. Now you can just mouse over. So that's, you know, it works both ways. If I click on this, it will actually open this learn more link in whatever your browser is. And it did that for me on the second screen because I clicked on it by mistake. There are also similar changes in Spotlight on the lock screen, which you can't bring up, obviously because we're recording here. But if you look at lock screen personalization settings, you'll see that Windows Spotlight is the default. And on this lock screen you're going to see a similar button to this similar effect. You can learn more about the particular image and so forth. So they're making these kind of look and work more alike. And so that's pretty good. And then I think that's most of the new stuff for what's coming in March. As I record this, I mean, there is more and there's fixes and other things. But as far as just features that you might notice, that's the big one in February, which as I record this has occurred. But some of these features haven't rolled out yet, right, because they're on cfr, right? The controlled feature release schedule. So they roll out over time. So different people will see different features, etc. They have enhanced taskbar previews. This one is very hard to show. And in fact, I can't say that I have ever seen anything meaningful. So I'm going to pull over a couple of windows so you can actually see what that looks like. So this is that. That window I brought up by mistake earlier, Microsoft Edge. So File Explorer. And I guess I'll just bring up Typora just to have something there. So when you mouse over the taskbar icon for running Windows or applications that are pinned down here, you'll see a thumbnail. And obviously if I mouse over, it goes up to that thing. So as I move across, you can see the thumbnail for each. And so the description of this improvement is that these taskbar thumbnails have been improved and they have improved animations as well. So looking at them, I can't say that I see much of a difference, although it feels like there's a little more detail in there. So maybe they've just improved either the resolution or the scaling of this thing is. It's kind of hard to say. So that's one. The other interesting change here to me, and we get rid of that weirdness is in File Explorer. So if I go to the desktop, you can see some of the stuff I still have here on my desktop. And if I right click here, I get a new menu, and it has a lot of stuff in it. I can add new documents, I can create a new zip file, and I can create a new folder and a shortcut, I should say. But a new folder is in here. What you couldn't do was right click on the same folder if it's over here in the navigation pane and get any of those options. So what they've added is right click new folder. Right. It doesn't provide any of the new document type, new shortcut, et cetera. But you can now create a new folder. I guess this was something people were asking for. I suppose it makes a little bit of sense in the context of this thing, you know, this navigation bar. So that is new to 24H2 and probably, I assume, 23H2 in early 2025. And I can't show you this either. But if I were to, say, open multiple tabs and I go to all of these different places, whatever it might be, and I log out, or I just get logged out, right? Time goes by, I log out, I come back and I run File Explorer again, it will come up with those tabs again after a logout. It's not going to do it now. In fact, I think if I just open it, you'll see it goes back to the way it was before. But if you had this thing running and you sign off, maybe you reboot, whatever you log in again, you're going to get those tabs back, which is pretty good. Also related here is when you right click on the time and date in the system tray, you get a couple of options here. One of them is adjust date and time. Most people are going to have this set to automatic on both of these things, time zone and time. But if you wanted to for some reason set your time zone manually, you can do that easily enough if you're an administrator. So up and through the beginning of 2025, any version of Windows, I believe you had to have administrative privileges to change the time zone on your computer. I'm sure there's a legacy reason for that. But as of that update from February 2025, anyone can now change their time zone manually if desired. So if you have standard user rights, not a problem there. And then the final one, which I tried to figure out a way to show this to you and I just couldn't get it to work. I think, I don't, I don't think I have. This feature on this particular computer is something called Work across Devices. And so this is an Apple like feature where you're on your phone or a Tablet, you're using OneDrive and you're using it to access some kind of a document, a Word doc, an Excel spreadsheet, something like that, where it opens inside of the OneDrive app. While you're doing that, or before you started that, you have logged out of your computer. So when you come back and you log in, you'll get a little pop up down here from OneDrive that will say, hey, you were working on this thing on another device. Would you like to keep working on it here? And if you click yes, it will open not in OneDrive, because that doesn't make sense in Windows, but in whatever that application is. And it's a way to get back, just kind of get up and running again. So obviously the, the one requirement here, other than getting the update, which I don't have, is that the document you're working on has to be saved to OneDrive. I mean, that makes sense. You were in OneDrive, that's how you open the thing in the first place. But in Windows you have to. Well, you would typically have your system set up so that you're backing up or syncing those folders, you know, for documents and pictures and so forth. And so this is, this is how they're, they're handling that kind of round robin system. So that's most of it. Again between February March 2025. There is more than I've described here. Most of the other things are just fixes or minor things or maybe don't impact most people. But I know this doesn't sound like a really compelling list of exciting new features, but that's kind of the point. It's been a couple of years of really chaotic system updating from Microsoft. We get something every month. It's been kind of crazy. So I like to see this level of updating. It's. It's kind of a nice change from the past, so hopefully it continues. It won't, but anyway, that's what it looks like for the first part of 2025. So thank you so much for watching. We will have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can find out more at TWiT TV. H O W you can watch these videos now on YouTube with ads, but we would really like you to subscribe to Club Twit if you could. And thank you so much to everyone who has. We really appreciate you. Club Twit has a lot of different perks. You get access to all the shows obviously without the at without any ads, which to me is fantastic. But also you get to support the network, which is also great. So thank you very much for watching and thank you especially to those of you who have subscribed. I'll see you next week.

Podcast Narrator (15:57)

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